Chair Legs and Panel (300s CE): Art, History and Details

Chair Legs and Panel (300s CE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This ivory carving was made to sheath wooden furniture made in India for trade along the Silk Road, which stretched from Rome to China. Indian ivory-faced furnishings--along with lacquer boxes from China and painted glass from Rome--were found in an extraordinary deposit of luxury goods at a site called Begram. The wood on which the ivory and lacquer were affixed has long disintegrated, and only the small pieces remain.

Object facts

• Title: Chair Legs and Panel
• Date: 300s CE
• Culture: Afghanistan, Begram (chair legs); India (panel), Kushan period (chair legs); Mughal dynasty (1526-1756) (panel)
• Type: Ivory
• Technique: ivory
• Dimensions: Overall: 43.8 cm (17 1/4 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art - Kushan
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1975.103

Collection credit

Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Tardy, J. Les ivoires; évolution décorative du Ier siècle à nos jours. Paris: Tardy, 1972.
• Lee, Sherman E. "The Year in Review for 1975." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 63, no. 2 (1976): 31-71.
• Czuma, Stanislaw J., and Rekha Morris. Kushan Sculpture: Images from Early India. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1985.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.